Tuesday, July 14, 2015

This Adramyttium Earth

This Adramyttium Earth possesses no soul, so it seeks to devour ours.

Our uplifted gaze belies our truculent fixation within gravity. We dream of
flight as if it is redemption, while all our waking day we show the soil the
soles of our feet as they crease the craton, ancient and unforgiving though it
may be.

Birds course through contrary winds for they are wind themselves. Airstream
bodies flex hollow bones: a pivot of the
head, flare of the tail, salute of the smallest pinion – all these carve an
unseen furrow as though sculpting space. What beauty might that be… the
inversion of a bird’s flight through air as polished stone?

High overhead they drift under the puffy evening clouds which part here to
show an opaline blue, and there to reveal a tawny amber, stained glass windows
into an eternal evening. The sky is as light as the heart’s mortality heavy.

Eternity receives our souls in as many ways as the rock hound unearths his
minerals. A moment’s reach into a rocky brook retrieves a glossy serpentine. A
sweaty dig continues for hours until the sharp ring of a shovel signals the
unseen ore. We are collected tonight or tomorrow, mined in a minute or a month…
or lifted one cell at a time from sand to star.

What we imagine is the flood, a driving irresistible force that smacks into
us and we are never the same. What we experience is the rain, one drop at a
time rinsing dust from flesh, flesh from spirit. We emerge transfigured
unaware: that which was urgent and vital is nothing… that which was nothing is
essential.

This is not our expectation; it seems not our nature. Indeed we are claimed
but not owned by this Adramyttium Earth: to crush it and to be crushed, to bind
it and to be bound, to release it and to be released.

God in the Wasteland (The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams) by David Wells

Authentic Christianity by Ray Stedman

Problem of Pain by CS Lewis

Mere Christianity by CS Lewis

How Should We Then Live by Francis Schaeffer

Escape From Reason by Francis Schaeffer

He is There and He is Not Silent by Francis Schaeffer

The God Who is There by Francis Schaeffer

New Testament by God

Old Testament by God

Comments on Books

Schaeffer taught me there is no question larger than God: while there are many questions that can challenge my interpretations, there are none that can unhinge my faith.

CS Lewis taught me that real answers to large questions begin with belief in a rational God.

Schaeffer and Lewis are almost exclusively responsible for my inability to accept the premise of relative truth while at the same time not allowing me to get comfortable (lazy) with absolute truth. To explore this with more recent work (1994) see God in the Wasteland by Wells - surprisingly he mentions neither Schaeffer nor Lewis in his bibliography.